From a research agenda to a cryptology school
My twenty years at CINVESTAV were not only a sequence of papers. They helped shape a sustained school of public-key cryptographic engineering built around mathematics, computer arithmetic, implementation, security analysis, and graduate training.
A research program that evolved from reconfigurable hardware and elliptic curves through pairings and discrete logarithms to isogeny-based and post-quantum cryptography.
One of eleven professors who submitted the proposal establishing CINVESTAV's independent Department of Computer Science.
Across changing topics, the recurring approach has been to connect mathematical structure, exact arithmetic cost, implementation platforms, and concrete security.
From efficient arithmetic to cryptanalysis and post-quantum cryptography
Pairings in hardwareFinite-field arithmetic and pipeline scheduling; CHES 2009 Best Paper.
Faster binary elliptic curvesλ-coordinate formulas and optimized arithmetic; CHES 2013 Best Paper.
Concrete cryptanalysis at scaleCharacteristic-three discrete-log computations challenged parameter choices once associated with high security.
Post-quantum transitionCSIDH, SQALE, SQIsign and implementation-oriented isogeny research.
Hashing to elliptic curvesSwiftEC and efficient indifferentiable hashing.
Cryptanalysis meets machine learningNeural-network extraction work at EUROCRYPT 2024–2025, including a 2025 Best Paper Award.
Graduate supervision & postdoctoral mentoring
Across two decades, I have supervised or co-supervised 42 graduate theses—9 PhD and 33 MSc—and supervised 3 postdoctoral fellows.
The work spans reconfigurable hardware, elliptic-curve and pairing-based cryptography, finite-field arithmetic, discrete logarithms, isogeny-based cryptography, privacy and security systems, and post-quantum cryptography.
From cryptographic ideas to systems people actually used
Electronic voting at CINVESTAV
FIDELIS brought privacy, authentication, verifiability, and homomorphic tallying into official academic elections. The 2017 voter roll included 623 faculty across nine CINVESTAV campuses.
Privacy-preserving contact tracing
A decentralized contact-tracing effort designed to notify risky contacts while avoiding disclosure of identities, locations, or social graphs.
Paper awards & distinctions
Polynomial Time Cryptanalytic Extraction of Deep Neural Networks in the Hard-Label Setting
SwiftEC: Shallue–van de Woestijne Indifferentiable Function to Elliptic Curves
Software Implementation of Koblitz Curves over Quadratic Fields
Lambda Coordinates for Binary Elliptic Curves
Hardware Accelerator for the Tate Pairing in Characteristic Three Based on Karatsuba-Ofman Multipliers
Co-founding LATINCRYPT & ASCrypto
LATINCRYPT began in Puebla, Mexico, in 2010 as an international conference dedicated to cryptology and information security in Latin America.
I was General Chair of the inaugural LATINCRYPT 2010 and later General Chair and Program Co-Chair of LATINCRYPT 2015. Together with ASCrypto, the initiative helped create recurring conferences, advanced schools, mentorship, and international collaboration for the regional cryptography community.
LATINCRYPT / ASCrypto history ↗
A characteristic-3 discrete-log record
With Gora Adj, Isaac Canales-Martínez, Nareli Cruz-Cortés, Alfred Menezes, Thomaz Oliveira, and Luis Rivera-Zamarripa, I participated in the computation of discrete logarithms in GF(36·509), using machines at CINVESTAV and the University of Waterloo.
US$2,048 on RSA-2048 and quantum computing
In 2017, Daniel J. Bernstein and I made a scientific wager about whether a quantum computer will publicly factor the RSA-2048 challenge before LATINCRYPT 2033.
Dan wins if the factorization of RSA-2048 is publicly announced, with the factors, and plausibly claimed to have been obtained by quantum computing before the deadline. I win otherwise.
The stake is US$2,048. The deadline is the LATINCRYPT 2033 recent-results session.